Content Management: How to Avoid the Content ‘Cul-de-Sac’

Antonia Bos, Brett Nielsen

In the labyrinth of content technology solutions and conflicting content demands, trying to make content ‘all things to all tools,’ can result in a painfully time-consuming journey that often leads you down a dead-end. By thinking about published content as the sum of its parts and looking at documents as blocks of data on the page, you can take steps to better navigate the path ahead.

Why is it important to reach your destination?

For Marketing and Sales teams to be as effective as possible, they must be able to create, store, find and distribute compliant, relevant, and up-to-date content to the right people at the right time; be that the latest annual fund performance on the website, or a quarterly update with clients. Furthermore, there is an increasing need to more accurately measure the impact of distributed content: did the target audience read it? Did they share it? Did it trigger the recipient to “get in touch” or “buy a product”? These insights help marketers prove the ROI of campaigns, identify which content and messages resonate the most, and optimise their editorial calendars, enabling them to continuously improve their published content to drive customer engagement.

How do you know you’re in a content ‘cul-de-sac’?

Many of Alpha’s clients have bright, hard-working teams that often end up in a content ‘cul-de-sac’; manually managing content between systems, with limited controls, and little to no line of sight of their content’s effectiveness. How can you spot if you’re one of them?

Are your Sales Managers unable to produce client-ready, compliance-approved material with less than a day’s notice?

Are your marketing and product teams unable to evidence who is interacting with their content?

Does everyone deny that content is their problem to solve?

Are you paying licence fees for smart technology that is not yet delivering on its promises?

Route-planning for your content journey

Based on the lessons learned and interviews with clients operating in this space* Alpha have identified 4 key guiding principles to get you back on track:

Know your Content: Before investing in new technology, complete an audit of your existing collateral; standardise your content into components and templates that are compliance-approved

Lead with People: Pick a couple of key use cases to test the solution first. Put the right governance in place and people to own and steward your content and data

Meta-Data Matters: Define a common vocabulary to make content easily searchable and to better understand where content is being used

Sponsorship and Buy-in: The most successful programmes are run as a joint venture between Sales and Marketing; expectations should be set on the time and engagement required to prove the benefits

*Insights gathered via Alpha’s ‘2019 Sales Enablement’ Forums, held in London and New York, with senior members of Distribution and Business Management teams from fourteen leading Asset & Wealth Managers.

How can Alpha help?

Alpha’s Distribution practice has specialists with the expertise to work with you across your content management initiatives. We would be delighted to discuss these further with you at any time.

To understand more about content management in your industry, or to understand more about how Alpha can help, please get in touch with our Distribution specialists.

About the Author

Antonia is a Principal at Alpha with over 15 years’ experience in financial services in Distribution & Marketing Services consulting, helping Senior Stakeholders to define and deliver strategic change. She has experience shaping and leading business transformation programmes from strategy through to execution, working closely with senior stakeholders and managing diverse teams for leading asset managers across the industry.

Brett is a Senior Manager at Alpha who has worked on a variety of projects spanning Business Requirements Analysis, Process Definition, Solution Architecture, Systems Selection & Implementation and Business Process Reengineering. Brett has a strong analytical background and deep expertise in multiple digital systems, such as Seismic and Salesforce Lightning.